How to change the World
What do you do when you’re faced with an insurmountable problem? You can be as motivated as you want, yet still be faced with a daunting challenge. Some of the most important problems we face tend to be the hardest to grasp, from something as large-scale as Global Warming to something as personal as sticking to a diet. For some reason, our minds have trouble understanding the deep structures in these problems, identifying the best actions to take, and maintaining the motivation to take them step-by-step.
This blog post is a first step towards my attempt to better understand large, daunting problems requiring action at a large scale. My end goal is to write a larger piece on this topic, but, since that is also a daunting problem requiring action over a long timeframe, I’ll be testing my first approach: taking it step by step, writing in the open, and collecting lots of feedback from anyone who submits it.
Large Scale Problems
This project started with a simple realization: the world is full of hard problems. Many of us acknowledge that things like declining voter participation, increasing gun violence, and unethical consumerism are important problems that require large-scale collective action, yet even the most determined people struggle to feel like they’re making a dent.
One classic example of such a problem is the Tragedy of the Commons. This problem centers around the fact that, given a shared common resource, when the number of people that share that resource gets big enough, it’s very easy for even good and generous people to justify the thought of
“Well…if I just take a little bit more than I’m supposed to, it won’t really affect anyone else, right”
However, the trap ends up being that if everyone thinks like this, the shared resource will eventually get depleted, leaving everyone with nothing. We all know that the optimal solution is to share the resource fairly, yet it’s so hard to really fully understand the negative consequences of taking just a tiny bit more than you’re supposed to.
This example extends to things like
- Recycling: “If I leave my car running for one more minute, will the atmosphere really get warmer because of this?”
- Gentrification: “I’m just one person moving in here. The apartment is already empty so someone else is just going to take it”
- Dieting: “If I eat this one cookie I definitely won’t see it on the scale”
- Global Issues: “If I donate one dollar, will it really help solve extreme poverty?”
The most frustrating part is that the sentiment behind each of these statements is completely valid. One minute of idling doesn’t cause Global Warming, but billions might. One person moving into a working-class community won’t cause gentrification, but thousands might. One cookie won’t cause you to gain weight, but one a day might. One dollar won’t solve extreme poverty, but millions would go a long way.
These Large-Scale Problems tend to fall in one of four categories:
- Not My Problem: Global Issues like far away epidemics, extreme poverty, gun violence, and immigration. We tend to think that only large institutions have the reach to make a dent in these problems.
- It’s too big/difficult: Gentrification, climate change, and voter participation are all issues where we know exactly what to do, yet it would require everyone to coordinate at once which seems outright impossible
- Just this once…: Very familiar and personal problems fall into this category with things like dieting, drug addiction, and procrastination. Most of these involve only a single person, but lots of repeated actions over a large time span, which still make them hard to conceptualize.
- It’s (probably) not that bad: Many bad societal habits of unethical consumerism like eating meat, buying real diamonds, and using products made in countries with weak labor laws are issues that we directly contribute to, but it’s very hard to associate our individual action to the ultimate effect
Why is this so difficult?
I have spent a lot of time thinking about why these two concepts seem so difficult to comprehend together. It’s easy to understand how little a dollar goes towards buying a car and it’s easy to understand that $20,000 is made up of lots of single dollars, so why is it so hard to make the leap that every dollar saved is a dollar closer towards buying that car you really want?
My hypothesis is that these Large-Scale Problems are hard to grasp because our brains aren’t wired for these kinds of problems. For most of human history, we tended to live in small groups where our problems were all
- Local: We only care about problems that will directly affect us
- Simple: Problems have direct cause-effect relationships
- Small and Short: Problems involved no more than 100 people at most and lasted no longer than a year at their longest
However, Large-Scale Problems usually fail in one of these dimensions. Global warming is extremely complex with lots of confounding factors, extremely large and operates over timescales lasting years. Ethical consumerism is a problem that’s non-local, relatively short, but quite large. Dieting is extremely local and relatively simple, yet we struggle to comprehend the long time-scales required to maintain a balanced diet.
After we moved on from living in small groups to forming societies and civilizations, we evolved socially and culturally, but not biologically. Our brains still like thinking locally, simple, and small.
So…now what?
In order to understand a specific problem, it’s helpful to ask yourself the following questions to place the problem on each of these axes:
- Attribution: How direct is the causal link between my action and the resulting effect?
- Time Scale: How short is the time from my action to the resulting effect?
- Difficulty Scale: How much does my single action help solve the problem?
- Confounding Factors: Does the problem have lots of other factors that complicate it and make it more complex?
- Personal Impact: What is the expected impact to me, personally?
Once you’ve answered these questions, it’s usually helpful to think about other similar problems and find the ones that have similar answers.
Many of these problems already have best-practice solutions for how individuals can contribute. For many of these, we just need to continue doing our part and encouraging others to do so. If a solution tends to work for a similar problem, it might work for yours too!
Interested in following along?
This blog post is an initial exploration into this topic that I plan to continue. Over the next year I plan to refine these axes, test my hypothesis, consult with experts, start classifying individual problems, researching solutions, and trying to find new ways that we can start contributing towards solutions to some of these.
If you liked this post, please support it by giving it a clap and starting a dialogue! Feedback is very much encouraged, so please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you’d like to contribute in any way!
